Both the Palm Pre (shown here) and the Symbian OS 5.0 (above) support full multi-tasking. The iPhone does not. That offers some gaming and security benefits for the iPhone, but prevents some useful apps. Full multi-tasking is rumored to be coming with iPhone OS 4.0 this summer. (Source: TechSource)

Might Apple be cooking up a counter to its competitors by at last bring multi-tasking to its smartphone?

According
toAppleInsider,
Apple will finally be bringing a "full-on solution" to
multi-tasking with iPhone OS 4.0 which is set to debut this summer.
Presumably that means that third-party apps will finally be allowed
to run in the background on the phone. The sources were scant
on details about how it would remedy performance, battery life, and
security issues, but they did say that the multi-tasking would use an
interface similar to that in the Mac versions of OS X.

Apple's
iPhone is among the best-selling smartphones and is second
in market volume only to the incredible successful
Blackberries from Research in Motion. Apple's massive developer
community and gigantic collection of apps make a phone that would
otherwise be seen as just beneath top hardware offerings seem like
the top of the pack.

However, Apple has slipped behind the
bleeding edge of the competition, even as its app offerings have
flourished. Its competitors -- Palm, Symbian, Research in
Motion, and Google (makers of Android OS) – all support
multi-tasking in their smartphone operating systems. Apple's OS
X distribution on the iPhone artificially prevents third-party
application backgrounding (multi-tasking), only allowing push
notifications as of iPhone OS 3.0.

There have been a few major
exceptions. Currently, the iPhone's phone, SMS, email, iPod,
voice recorder, Nike+ apps and a handful of others can run in the
background. This means, for example, that you can use apps and
play music at the same time (but only using Apple's built in music
player).

Apple has previously stated that backgrounding apps
represents a security risk. The iPhone's OS kills apps when you
accept calls or return to the home screen, rather than sending them
to the background. That makes it harder for spyware, adware, or
viruses to run on the phone without the user's knowledge.

The
security comes at a cost though -- third-party apps that are
available at all times (run in the background) like instant
messaging, location-aware apps, internet radio, etc. are not able to
be supported unless you "jailbreak" your iPhone, running
software to hack the OS and remove Apple's restrictions.

One
of the big problems is that multi-tasking could hurt gaming on the
iPhone if resource management isn't implemented perfectly.
Currently the iPhone rivals
the PSP Go and Nintendo DSi as a mobile gaming platform.
Its smartphone rivals though have been unable to muster much gaming
success -- titles tend to be limited by either inefficient
multi-tasking and/or by requiring the apps to be run by abstraction
layers, such as Adobe Flash/Flash Lite, Microsoft Silverlight, or Sun
Java/Android Dalvik runtimes.

Despite these shortcomings, many
iPhone users have demanded multi-tasking. Multi-tasking was
rumored to be coming both in iPhone OS 2.0 and iPhone OS 3.0, but
never came in full form. Thus its reasonable to be wary about
whether iPhone OS 4.0 will truly bring multi-tasking to the table at
last.

"Nowadays you can buy a CPU cheaper than the CPU fan." -- Unnamed AMD executive